China Unbound: A New World Disorder

By Joanna Chiu

While the United States stumbles, an award-winning foreign correspondent chronicles China’s dramatic moves to become a dominant power.

As the world’s second-largest economy, China is extending its influence across the globe with the complicity of democratic nations. Joanna Chiu has spent a decade tracking China’s propulsive rise, from the political aspects of the multi-billion-dollar “New Silk Road” global investment project to a growing sway on foreign countries and multilateral institutions through “United Front” efforts. Chiu offers readers background on the protests in Hong Kong, underground churches in Beijing, and exile Uyghur communities in Turkey, and exposes Beijing’s high-tech surveillance and aggressive measures that result in human rights violations against those who challenge its power. The new world disorder documented in China Unbound lays out the disturbing implications for global stability, prosperity, and civil rights everywhere. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781487007683

Joanna Chiu

JOANNA CHIU is an internationally recognized authority on China, whose work has appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, BBC World, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Quartz, Al Jazeera, GlobalPost, CBC, and NPR. For seven years she was based in China as a foreign correspondent, reporting for top news agencies such as Agence France Presse (AFP) and Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), and in Hong Kong, she reported for the South China Morning Post, The Economist, and Associated Press (AP). In 2012 her story on refugees in Hong Kong won a Human Rights Press Award, and in 2018 her report on #MeToo cases in Asia was named one of the best Foreign Policy long-form stories. She is the founder and chair of the NüVoices editorial collective, which celebrates the creative and academic work of women working on the subject of China. She is currently a senior journalist covering China-related topicsfor the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, and has previously served as bureau chief of the Star Vancouver. She speaks frequently at major events and conferences.

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INTRODUCTION

Like rolling thunder, 2,008 drummers in shimmering robes drummed to the same beat, marking the start of the four-hour spectacle that was the Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing.

As they danced around the traditional bronze drums, the musicians sang out a quote from the Analects of Confucius: Isn’t it delightful to have friends coming from afar?

Following close behind, fifteen thousand performers in elaborate costumes swept across the Bird’s Nest stadium in a carefully choreographed celebration of Chinese history. They showcased the nation’s four great inventions — the compass, gunpowder, paper, and the printing press — and then artifacts gave way to a kaleidoscopic light show representing China’s hopes of harmony between the peoples of the world.

By all measures, the 2008 ceremony was a fantastic success, its scale easily outstripping that of any Olympic opening of the past. The Summer Games were an opportunity for Beijing to present its best and most benign face to the world, from its long history and multi-ethnic cultures to its many technological innovations. It brought a surge of hope in the country, as well as around the world, that as China rose in global status its ascent would be beneficial to global communities.

Despite all the messages of friendship, however, Chinese Olympic athletes were under great pressure from the government to trounce the competition. Thousands of dedicated sports schools in the country had trained children intensively from six years old, leaving little time for an academic education. Many athletes developed chronic health problems, while others faced limited prospects if they failed to become stars. China wanted to present a friendly face to the international community, but it also wanted respect.

More than a dozen years after that triumphant ceremony, Beijing is no longer broadcasting songs of friendship to the world. Now Chinese officials engage in wolf warrior diplomacy, uttering threats at any perceived slight to their country’s pride.

Was that grand show of affection always just fiction?

I sought the opinion of Jan Wong, the first Canadian journalist of Chinese descent to serve as bureau chief of the Globe and Mail newspaper’s Beijing outpost, from 1988 to 1994. Before that, in 1972, Wong had travelled from her hometown of Montreal to Beijing as an international university student. China was closed off to most Western visitors until the 1970s, as it suffered tumultuous years of internal conflict during the Cultural Revolution.

Wong recalled coming to China at a time of tentative social recovery when Chinese leaders and citizens expressed a genuine desire for global friendship. "I remember in those days, if you just showed up in China, they were so grateful you were there. Because everyone was tilting to [formal diplomatic relations with] Taiwan. And the Chinese were always talking about the friendship between their country and your country.

"The Canadian hockey team went to China, and they were playing at the recently built Capital Indoor Stadium. I got a ticket, and they were playing a team from Harbin. And everyone was chanting, You yi di yi. bi sai di er. The whole stadium. ‘Friendship first, competition second.’

So it’s completely different now, and now they are bullies. China went from being the underdogs to the bullies. They’re still not confident; they still have this residual complex, like they want respect and everything is about respect. They’re really thin-skinned and jump to conclusions, thinking other countries don’t respect them. But they have so much clout now.

Wong and I were speaking in mid-2019, in the aftermath of Beijing’s arrest of two Canadians in China: my friend Michael Kovrig, who is a diplomat-on-leave, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur. The move was in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of American authorities. The Americans wanted Meng extradited to the United States to face fraud charges, but authorities seemed to underestimate the tech executive’s level of influence and how her arrest would enrage China’s leaders.

The hostage-taking of the Canadian men took the Western world by surprise; until then, it had been widely ignorant of the many times China had taken foreigners of Asian descent as political prisoners. The cruel treatment of the two Michaels also dismantled a longstanding myth that China was heading in a liberal direction.

Many Westerners had accepted the idea that as China opened up to the world, things would get better. By the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China was introducing market reforms and establishing diplomatic ties with more countries. The Communist world was gradually liberalizing its authoritarian systems and would soon become just like us.

The 1989 Tiananmen massacre of mostly young pro-reform protesters in Beijing shattered these hopes. People around the world watched in shock; they couldn’t believe Chinese troops had opened fire on their own people, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peaceful demonstrators.

Decades later, however, the myth of a liberalizing China still persisted, and it wasn’t just Americans who believed it. China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001, after a lengthy process of debate and negotiation. Beijing’s successful entry into the WTO was, at the time, deeply symbolic of the country’s integration into a global order based on the rule of law.

Western leaders were optimistic. Bill Clinton said in a memorable 2000 speech, The WTO agreement will . . . advance the goals America has worked for in China for the past three decades. Membership in the WTO would not create a free society in China overnight or guarantee that China would always play by global rules, but over time, Clinton said, China would move in the right direction.

But the opposite happened. As China became richer, it became more authoritarian. The state retained significant control over its economy and mammoth state-owned enterprises under a philosophy called socialism with Chinese characteristics. Officials have returned to large-scale persecution of scholars, lawyers, artists, activists, and minorities. Targets include an estimated million Uyghurs in internment camps.

For far too long, Western societies have mishandled or simply ignored Beijing’s actions out of narrow self-interest. Decades of wilful misinterpretation have, over time, become complicity in the toxic diplomacy, human rights abuses, and foreign interference China engages in today.

I use the term the West in this book intentionally, because it is crucial to recognize the colonial histories in which modern frictions arose. The Western world view was one where the East, encompassing Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, represented newly discovered territories that early European colonizers depicted as static and undeveloped, and therefore deserving of domination.

Beijing has reason to feel that the Chinese people have been grievously insulted. The emotional baggage of China’s so-called century of humiliation, from 1839 to 1949, at the hands of allied European powers and Japan helps explain contemporary Chinese leaders’ great sensitivity and their compulsion to best the West.

Some 140 years ago, Canadian officials tricked my great-great-grandfather into leaving his home in southern China for the promise of mining gold in Canada. When he arrived, after an expensive journey, he found he had little choice but to toil alongside thousands of other Chinese men to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was brutal work in harsh conditions for little pay, and at least six hundred workers lost their lives. Few of those who survived the ordeal were able to settle in Canada with their families, since the head tax placed exorbitant fees on subsequent entry of Chinese migrants. My great-great-grandfather returned to China with little to show for his years of hard labour. Then, in the early mid-twentieth century, before the Chinese Civil War broke out, my grandparents fled from southern Guangdong province to British-controlled Hong Kong in search of stability.

I was born in Hong Kong several years before the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing. Like everyone in Hong Kong, my parents were horrified by what the Chinese government had done to the youthful protesters. Already, Hong Kongers’ sense of identity was very different from that of Chinese mainlanders. To protect ourselves from the region’s uncertain future, my family decided to leave Hong Kong before the British handed the city back to Chinese rule in 1997.

This time, we were accepted as immigrants to Canada, and I was lucky to grow up taking basic freedoms for granted. But as I started to read about the one-child policy and other draconian rules in China that profoundly affected its citizens’ lives, I felt guilty. There I was, playing sports and gunning for top grades at my middle school in Canada, while in mainland China, infant girls were being abandoned at birth, most in orphanages but some in wells or ditches on the side of the street, their parents choosing to abandon and even kill them because they couldn’t afford the fines they would incur if they tried for a coveted male child.

By the late 1990s, I started to notice signs of Beijing’s influence at home in Vancouver. My father worked for a Canadian media company offering programming in Mandarin and Cantonese, and I heard whispers about popular commentators being fired or pressured to censor their commentary on Chinese politics. Later I would learn these efforts were part of Beijing’s attempts to win influence abroad through economic and political enticements, or otherwise through intimidation and harassment.

An irresistible sense of an important unfolding story led me to learn Mandarin in preparation to move to China. As a teenager, I pored over books about China in public libraries, devising a self-study program where I’d assign myself essays to write. Then I took all the Chinese history, politics, and sociology courses I could fit into my university schedule, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the role of Chinese women revolutionaries in the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, given all the questions I fielded about where I was from and why my English was so good, I was aware that people in the West viewed me as an outsider. But I thought this outsider status would benefit me as a journalist, that a lack of belonging could help me see things more objectively.

I wanted to be in China to chronicle its rapid economic development and help people around the world understand the country’s complex social issues. Instead, I got a front-row seat as China veered toward totalitarianism. My time in Hong Kong and Beijing coincided with the rise of Xi Jinping as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Before he took power in 2012, some thought Xi would be a liberal reformer, but those expectations were dashed as human rights and press freedom plunged to new lows. Under Xi’s leadership, China has imprisoned thousands of people for even mild social criticism as the country’s censorship and surveillance apparatus becomes ever more sophisticated.

Torture and forced confessions are common in China’s legal system, though the number of executions each year is a state secret. In the last decade of front-line reporting, I have seen grieving mothers of Tiananmen Square massacre victims dragged away by police and have interviewed dozens of persecuted artists, underground church leaders, writers, lawyers, and activists. Chinese police have far-reaching rights to detain suspects without charge in secret makeshift prisons for up to six months. The Orwellian system is called residential surveillance in a designated place. It is excruciating for family members, who have no idea where their loved ones have gone.

Some of the most haunting moments I had as a journalist in China came during interviews conducted via online messaging. On occasion, the messages would abruptly stop coming, leaving me to stare at the time stamp showing when my interview subject had last been online.

On plane rides home to Canada for the holidays, I would feel numb, as if a video recording of what I had witnessed were replaying on fast-forward in my head. For my friends working in different fields in China, it was a dynamic place with a lot to offer, but reporting on human rights and politics in Beijing was a truly dystopian experience.

A sliver of hope for many in China, and for observers of Chinese politics, was that once Xi stepped down after the customary ten-year term, his successor would discontinue the sweeping crackdowns on civil society. But then, on March 10, 2018, Xi won a lifetime mandate to rule. I was in the upper stands of the Great Hall of the People when it happened, squinting down at the stage where the country’s collected leadership sat stiffly in matching black suits. After the ballots were counted in the parliamentary vote to amend China’s constitution so that Xi could serve indefinitely, thousands of Chinese legislators erupted into fervent applause. In one stroke, the son of a revolutionary veteran had become the most powerful leader in modern China since Chairman Mao Zedong, consolidating the growing might of the military, economy, and state in the hands of one man.

The amended constitution said the abolishment of term limits will be conducive to safeguarding the authority and the unified leadership of the CCP Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. Xi is still only in his sixties, meaning that China’s authoritarian trajectory could continue for decades.

Several months after Xi’s coronation, when I couldn’t take any more of Beijing’s air pollution — which required me to take constant drags from my inhaler and occasional trips to the hospital — I packed my bags to return to Canada.

I regretted having to leave the China story behind with many fascinating topics left unexplored. But within months of my departure, Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver, and days later came the stunning news that Kovrig and Spavor were among the Canadians ensnared in the diplomatic fallout. Dystopian China had followed me home.

At the same time, tensions have ratcheted up between China and other countries over abuses in Xinjiang, a security law in Hong Kong affecting the freedoms of foreign citizens, international trade disputes and clashing territorial claims in the South China Sea, and the India-China border.

Canadian officials promised to announce a new comprehensive strategy to deal with an increasingly authoritarian Beijing. But several years later, no shift in policy has been announced.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., government leaders and pundits alike seemed to be gearing up for a second Cold War along ideological battle lines, where America represented Western democracies and China was the encroaching superpower of the East. Washington’s message to its allies was clear: You’re with China, or you’re with us.

Technology giant Huawei has become a proxy for U.S. struggles with Beijing, thanks to the Chinese government’s aggressive backing of its private companies. The U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada cooperate on intelligence matters in an alliance referred to as the Five Eyes. All members except for Canada have either banned or restricted Huawei from supplying equipment for their 5G networks.

Then, after the COVID-19 pandemic originated in Wuhan, China, some politicians across the Western world were careless in their language about the outbreak. Pandemic scapegoating led to a devastating rise in hate crimes against people of Asian descent, and advocates took officials to task for their role in branding the coronavirus the China Flu, or in U.S. president Donald Trump’s words, the kung flu.

There has, of course, long been racism in many countries against people of Chinese descent, who, compared to other ethnic groups, seem most often conflated with a government’s actions. It doesn’t matter if an individual’s family has been settled outside of China for generations. This has been highly detrimental to the quality of international research and dialogue on China, since people of Chinese descent have been subject to blanket suspicion and their valuable contributions overlooked.

In the wake of the March 2021 murders of Asian massage parlour workers in Atlanta, Georgia, American cybersecurity intelligence expert Amy Chang shared her experiences of trying to build a career in Washington, DC. She said the most egregious question she and many other Asians in Washington receive on a regular basis is Are you a Chinese spy?

Informing my travels for this book, from late 2018 to 2020, and my choice of people to interview, was a need to cut through the simplistic rhetoric that all too often obscures reality. I sought out individuals with unique lived experiences related to China, who aren’t often provided platforms from which they can inform the decisions of countries or multinational companies.

Members of the Chinese diaspora had, after all, tried to warn Western policymakers that Beijing was working clandestinely to spread its will around the world, but those warnings mostly went unheeded. Only recently have egregious cases prompted high-level responses.

Mayors and city councillors have expressed complete surprise when I’ve informed them that photos of them shaking hands at Lunar New Year events have shown up in propaganda boasting of China’s influence abroad. Some seemed unaware of the implications even when granting interviews to Chinese state-owned media. I could only shake my head when a Canadian politician complained to me that the state-run Xinhua news agency had twisted his words.

It is even more galling to watch governments accept investments and even sell off parcels of key infrastructure without due consideration. Even if Beijing is genuine in its reassurances that its massive New Silk Road global infrastructure investment plan isn’t part of a bid for political power, national oversight of such deals only makes sense. In Greece, for example, citizens are concerned about their government’s apparent willingness to take China’s side on issues at the United Nations so as to increase the likelihood of more Chinese investment.

Experts have also expressed fears that China and other authoritarian countries like Russia, Turkey, and Iran might forge formal alliances to challenge democracies. The on-the-ground reporting in this book in Turkey and Russia examines these claims.

All the while, Beijing uses racism from the West to deflect criticism, as noted by Yangyang Cheng, a China-born, U.S.-based particle physicist, in an essay for the Guardian. The Chinese Communist Party, Cheng wrote, makes self-­orientalising gestures, mirroring the worst of the China watchers, by defending its policies as suited to China’s ‘unique national condition’: disputed borderlands are described as ‘part of China since prehistoric times,’ and authoritarianism is welcomed by a people with ‘Confucian values.’

Many in the West are primed to accept these lies. But when we pay attention to people like Cheng who have their feet in different worlds, it helps to cut through propaganda and, to put it bluntly, reveal the hypocrisy on all sides.

It is difficult to step back and find the best paths forward for these complex geopolitical problems when the human crises are so urgent. My goal with this book is to provide necessary nuance and context, cross-country comparisons as well as important individual stories that can help ground public debate and inform governments’ and organizations’ policies on China.

To that end, I am deeply grateful to all those who spoke with me who are vulnerable to repercussions.

This book starts with a chapter set mostly in Beijing that lays out the background of China’s crackdowns on civil society and its forging of an ambitious foreign strategy and vision for an alternative world order. Chapter 2 draws on my years of reporting on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and its struggles to counteract both the shadowy forms of influence by the CCP’s United Front agents and the blunt-force use of laws and policing to quash dissent. Chapters 3 to 6 provide comprehensive case studies as well as individual stories in middle power countries — Canada, Australia, Italy, and Greece — that have faced economic and political pressure and coercion from Beijing. Chapters 5 and 6 also discuss China-EU relations more broadly. The last part of the book, featuring reporting in the U.S., Turkey, and Russia, gathers evidence on potential arenas of future global conflict, with clues to what can be done to avoid disastrous confrontations.

PART I

ONE CHINA, ONE SYSTEM

a grey star

1.

BEIJING

Rule by Law

I learned about the underground church from a member of a basketball group I joined after moving to Beijing in late 2014. The gym we rented was in a large public school complex tucked in the hutongs, a maze of ancient alleyways in the old walled city that now only exists in a few central neighbourhoods.

Every Tuesday, if the air quality was decent, I pedalled my bicycle to the gym after work. With my phone poking precariously out of my purse so I could hear directions from Baidu Maps, I careened around parked scooters and food vendors. Out of tiny metal pushcarts, the vendors sold delicious jianbing egg crepes or bright red skewers of candied hawthorn fruit, or strawberries if they were in season. The voice of the Baidu lady called out quick twists and turns and the unfamiliar alley names in Mandarin.

I had to use a Chinese app because, nearly five years earlier, in 2010, Google products had been blocked. The American technology giant had refused to self-censor its search results and elected instead to shut down its China search engine. Thousands of international websites are now only accessible in the country through a VPN, software that allows people to surf the internet as if they were in another country, but that doesn’t always work well. I had lived in Hong Kong previously, and though freedom of expression was under constant threat, at least the semi-autonomous city had fast and unfettered internet.

Our basketball group was made up of young male professionals, a few female university students, a youth basketball coach from Serbia, and me. There were plenty of bars and entertainment options in the city, but these tended to be raucous, and it was much easier to meet my first local friends while playing the most popular sport in China. The NBA was probably the most beloved American institution in the country.

After our game one night, one of my new friends — a particularly tall and athletic man in his late twenties — asked me what I was working on.

I bit my tongue. I had just received a freelance assignment from the Economist to investigate state suppression of religion in China — not really a subject for polite conversation in an authoritarian country. And I didn’t know this man well enough to guess how he would react.

So I told him I was researching Christianity. You know, in general.

His face brightened, and he immediately invited me to visit his Protestant church.

Oh, is it an official one? I asked, trying to be subtle.

No, he said, nonchalantly admitting to a subversive act against the state.

My mind was swimming with questions, but I didn’t get the chance to probe further; our time slot at the gym was up. So he sent me the church’s address over the ubiquitous social media app WeChat and said he would introduce me to his congregation’s leaders at the very next Sunday service.

Christianity first appeared in China in the seventh century, but it didn’t gain a significant presence until Jesuit missionaries arrived some nine hundred years later, late in the Ming dynasty, in the sixteenth century. The Jesuits played a key role not only in spreading the religion but in acting as intermediaries between Western and Chinese elites. Later, as relations with the West deteriorated, Christianity became associated with the aggression of Western imperial powers, and hostility in China grew against missionaries. In 1812, the Qing dynasty banned Europeans from spreading Christianity and later made violations of the new prohibition punishable by death. Chinese subjects who refused to reverse their conversions were given as slaves to Muslim leaders in the country, who at the time enjoyed better social standing in China than Christians did.

The role of missionaries in China grew when first Britain and then Britain and France defeated the Qing during the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860, respectively) and forced the dynasty to sign treaties that made Hong Kong a British colony and gave Westerners special privileges at various other ports. It was also during this time that Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious schoolteacher who failed the notoriously difficult national imperial examination several times and was therefore unable to become a civil servant, was exposed to missionary tracts.

Hong turned his frustration into an anti-imperial movement, initially preaching to friends and relatives who had also failed the civil service examinations. He soon mobilized millions of similarly disgruntled people in southern China and led the massive Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty from 1850 to 1864. The religious insurgents called for a complete shift in the political and social system and rejected traditional Confucian values, so they wanted to do more than simply topple the dynasty and replace the Qing emperor with Hong. They also wanted to convert the masses to a new kind of Christianity that included elements of Chinese folk religion. The uprising was the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century, in any part of the world, with an estimated twenty to seventy million casualties. The conflict also drove millions of civilians to flee to other parts of China or to emigrate abroad. Twentieth-century revolutionaries would later consider God’s Chinese Son a hero for trying to rid China of its rigid and feudal structures, though historians have noted that, in practice, Hong and other Taiping leaders took on many of the trappings of traditional power holders and often behaved similarly in the areas they controlled.

To this day, because of its associations with Western impe­rialism and civil uprising, Christianity continues to be one of the most restricted religions in the country. The government vets the appointment of all pastors in official churches, and no church is allowed to declare allegiance to any particular branch of Christianity. The Chinese Communist Party is officially atheist, and it prohibits its ninety million party members from holding any religious beliefs. And while the nation’s constitution purports to protect citizens’ religious freedoms, religious activity is in reality tightly monitored. China has one of the world’s largest populations of prisoners persecuted in relation to their religion. Some groups, such as the quasi-Christian Church of Almighty God and the Falun Gong spiritual movement, are outright banned, and their followers are subject to arrest. A relentless crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999 after the group organized a peaceful demonstration outside CCP headquarters to push for greater freedom to practise.

In short, Beijing seems highly suspicious of anything that involves large numbers of people pledging loyalty to a higher power than the Chinese Communist Party.

For years, police have been harassing and intimidating members of Christian house churches, unofficial congregations that refuse to register with authorities to operate under government oversight. Since mid-2014, authorities in the coastal province of Zhejiang have been tearing down the crosses that adorned the roofs of many such independent churches, including makeshift converted apartments and office buildings; protesting pastors were arrested and sentenced to as much as fourteen years in prison. In the winter of 2015, Christians around the country were wondering if this might portend a broader crackdown.

I took a cab to my friend’s church, which was out on the fourth ring expressway, a route that runs in a loop around the megacity. It was hard to find, because all I could see were identical rows of towering Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings. Eventually, I found a narrow unmarked entranceway next to a convenience store, which led into the courtyard of one of the apartment blocks.

Underground it may have been, but once you knew where to look, the church was far from clandestine. A large red cross plastered to a ground-level window advertised its presence. Posters of Bible verses with cartoon illustrations inside the building were also visible from the courtyard. Down a flight of stairs, I saw that its rooms included a high-ceilinged hall with neat rows of folding chairs and a much smaller space that doubled as a nursery and cloakroom.

In his sermon, the young pastor focused on analyzing passages of the Bible and avoided commentary on Chinese society. Afterwards, he asked me to stand and introduce myself. No one blinked an eye when I said I wasn’t religious but wanted to learn about their church. I didn’t want to announce to the group the fact that I was a journalist, in case undercover police were present, but I might not have needed to be so circumspect.

We are not exactly lying low, a church leader assured me in an interview following the service. We sing hymns so loudly, people in the community get curious and come down to see what’s going on. Anyone is welcome.

He also explained that with only a couple hundred members, their unregistered church was relatively small. At least in Beijing, congregations of their size didn’t normally attract official scrutiny. Still, he asked me not to name the church if I wrote about it.

As my unfailingly polite friend drove me back

Reviews for China Unbound

[fionaanne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book needed a better editor; journalism skills don't necessarily confer book writing ability.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

ABOUT THE BOOK: As the world’s second-largest economy, China is extending its influence across the globe with the complicity of democratic nations. Joanna Chiu has spent a decade tracking China’s propulsive rise, from the political aspects of the multi-billion-dollar “New Silk Road” global investment project to a growing sway on foreign countries and multilateral institutions through “United Front” efforts. Chiu offers readers background on the protests in Hong Kong, underground churches in Beijing, and exile Uyghur communities in Turkey, and exposes Beijing’s high-tech surveillance and aggressive measures that result in human rights violations against those who challenge its power. The new world disorder documented in China Unbound lays out the disturbing implications for global stability, prosperity, and civil rights everywhere. MY THOUGHTS: I didn't find any totally new information in this book. I've heard about the struggles of the Uighurs, for example, and of the ways China exerts influence on Canadians of Chinese origin. What was new was the depth and breadth of these types of actions, and that was highly troubling. I am not yet convinced, though, that we will see China emerge dominant in a new world order. First, the debt on their Belt and Road initiative will surely be an economic anchor, especially since Chinese financial markets aren't open; they aren't attractive to foreign investors. Second, China's population is aging. Demographics suggest that India will emerge as a stronger power than China. The book left me thinking about Canada's role in all of this. This country has been ambiguous about issues such as the independence of Taiwan and other issues. We may be forced to take a stronger position. Global warming increases the economic importance of the Arctic region, so Canada may face a direct challenge from China there. It may be time that our position regarding China reflect more of Canada's interests than of Canada's values. But where is the right balance? I don't know and I suspect finding it would require constant vigilance and adjustment.This is an awareness raising book. The author's familiarity with China is evident. A good, and important, read.